"I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please."
"What's your name?"
"I want to speak to Rob or Lesley. Is either of them there?"
"Who are you? Give me your name and state your business immediately."
"I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please."
As the phone was slammed down on her she accepted without drama that she was, as she had suspected, alone. Henceforth no Tessa, no Arnold, no wise Lesley from Scotland Yard could spare her the responsibility for her actions. Her parents, though she adored them, were not a solution. Her father the lawyer would listen to her testimony and declare that on the one hand this, but then again on the other hand that, and ask her what objective proof she had for these very serious allegations. Her mother the doctor would say you're overheating, darling, come home and have a bit of R and R. With this thought uppermost in her bleary head she had opened up her laptop, which she did not doubt would also be cram-full of cries of pain and indignation about Arnold. But no sooner had she gone on-line than the screen popped and dwindled to nothing. She went through her procedures — in vain. She phoned a couple of friends only to establish that their machines were unaffected.
"Wow, Ghita, maybe you've picked up one of these crazy viruses from the Philippines or wherever those cyber-freaks hang out!" one of her friends had cried enviously, as if Ghita had been singled out for special attention.
Maybe she had, she agreed, and slept badly from worrying about the e-mails she had lost, the Ping-Pong chats she'd had with Tessa that she had never printed out because she preferred rereading them onscreen, they were more vivid that way, more Tessa.
The Beechcraft had still not taken off so Ghita, as was her habit, gave herself over to the larger questions of life, while studiously avoiding the largest of them all, which was what am I doing here and why? A couple of years ago in England — in my Era Before Tessa, as she secretly called it — she had agonized about the injuries, real and imagined, that she endured every day for being Anglo-Indian. She saw herself as an unsavable hybrid, half black girl in search of God, half white woman superior to lesser breeds without the law. Waking and sleeping, she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambitions and her humanity, and whether she should continue to study dance and music at the London college she was attending after Exeter or, in the image of her adoptive parents, follow her other star and enter one of the professions.
Which explains how one morning she found herself, almost on an impulse, sitting an examination for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, which, unsurprisingly since she had never given a thought to politics, she duly failed, but with the advice that she should reapply in two years' time. And somehow the very decision to sit the exam, though unsuccessful, released the reasoning behind it, which was that she was more at ease with herself joining the system than staying apart from it and achieving little beyond the partial gratification of her artistic impulses.
And it was at this point, visiting her parents in Tanzania, that she decided, again on impulse, to apply for local employment by the British High Commission, and to look for advancement once she was accepted. And if she had not done this she would never have met Tessa. She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to — even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites — but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. Which brought her back to the largest question of them all. She had loved Tessa, she had loved Bluhm, she loved Justin still and, if she was truthful, a little more than was proper or comfortable or whatever the word was. And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies, as she had heard them only yesterday from Woodrow's mouth. On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth. Which explained to Ghita's total satisfaction what she was doing here and why. "Better to be inside the system and fighting it," her father — an iconoclast in other ways — would say, "than outside the system, howling at it."
And Tessa, which was the wonderful thing, had said exactly the same.
The Beechcraft shook itself like an old dog and lurched forward, bumping laboriously into the air. Through her tiny window Ghita saw all Africa spread itself below her: slum cities, herds of running zebras, the flower farms of Lake Naivasha, the Aberdares, Mount Kenya faintly painted on the far horizon. And joining them like a sea, the endless tracts of misted brown bush scribbled over with pocks of green. The plane entered rain cloud, a brown dusk filled the cabin. Scorching sunlight replaced it, and was accompanied by an almighty explosion from somewhere out to Ghita's left. Without warning the plane rolled on its side. Lunch boxes, rucksacks and Ghita's travel bag skeltered across the gangway to a chorus of alarm bells and sirens and a flashing of red lights. Nobody spoke except for one old African man, who let out a peal of laughter and bellowed, "We love you, Lord, and don't you go forgettin' that," to the relief and nervous merriment of the other passengers. The plane had still not righted itself. The engine note dropped to a murmur. The African copilot with side-whiskers had found a handbook and was consulting a checklist while Ghita tried to read it over his shoulder. The rawhide captain turned in his seat to address his craven passengers. His sloped, leathern mouth matched the angle of the plane's wings.
"As you may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, one engine has cracked up," he said drily. "Which means we're going to have to go back to Wilson and pick up another of these things."
And I'm not afraid, Ghita noted, pleased with herself. Until Tessa died, things like this happened to other people. Now they're happening to me, and I can handle them.
Four hours later, she was standing on the tarmac at Lokichoggio.
* * *
"You Ghita?" an Australian girl yelled over the roar of engines and other people's shouted greetings. "I'm Judith. Hi!"
She was tall and red-cheeked and happy and wore a man's curly brown trilby and a T-shirt proclaiming the United Tea Services of Ceylon. They embraced, spontaneous friends in a wild roaring place. White U.N. cargo planes were taking off and landing, white lorries shunted and thundered, and the sun was a furnace, and the heat of it leaped up at her from the runway and the fumes of aircraft fuel shimmered in her eyes and dazzled her. With Judith to guide her, she squeezed herself into the back of a jeep amid sacks of mail to sit beside a sweating Chinese man in a dog collar and a black suit. Jeeps hurtled past them in the opposite direction, pursued by a convoy of white lorries headed for the cargo planes.
"She was a real nice lady!" Judith shouted from the passenger seat in front of her. "Very dedicated!" She was evidently talking about Tessa. "Why would anybody want to arrest Arnold? They're just plain stupid! Arnold wouldn't squash a fly. You're booked three nights, right? Only we got a bunch of nutritionists coming in from Uganda!"